Absence
Snowman are dead. SHAUN PRESCOTT hopes they keep it that way.
French author and visual artist Edouard Leve submitted the manuscript of his novel Suicide* on October 5, 2007. Ten days later he killed himself. The action inevitably influenced readings of his work following its posthumous release, and it’s tempting to conclude that Leve’s suicide was an intrinsic component of his work of art, that the book *required his death to bring it properly to life. Similarly, most writing in the lead up to Snowman’s final record has attempted to bind the record’s name and theme to the fact that Snowman is dead. It’s easy to dismiss all this as hot air, as lazy hyperbolic conflation, but there’s enough evidence here to support the theory.
Because rock groups are expected to keep delivering, even when everything suggests they either don’t want to or shouldn’t do so. For the most part rock music is expected to be ?fun?, to shirk from the conceptual lest it offend the intellect of it’s flighty consumers. Rock music is workmanlike. But Snowman are quitting at the peak of their command, with their most difficult record, and in a fashion that can only enrich the value of their standing work. It’s not a canny business move, and there’s nothing to suggest they’re incubating their legacy. When you first listen to Absence it’s striking how goddamned obvious this culmination is. Notwithstanding the biographical mystique/baggage it carries, Absence simply had to be the end. It’s an ending. The triad has closed.
Absence* recontextualises Snowman’s catalogue as a trilogy, and this is the afterlife to The Horse, The Rat and the Swans’ terminal Earthbound anguish. Here they’re calmer but no less haunted, no less in tumult. As the album progresses the vocals seem to disentangle from the ensemble and float away: pretty harmonies vaporise and reverberate into the ether, song structures dissipate and disappear, maudlin repetitious melodies linger sentimentally in all their nursery rhyme simplicity before ebbing into silence. If it weren’t for the stentorian basslines that stalk the likes of ‘Hyena’ and ‘Memory Lost’ this record would stand as an orchestral work in synthetic miniature. But this idyllic afterlife, with its aesthetic, melodic simplicities, is pursued by something very dark indeed. *Absence plays out like a nightmare in tawdry fluorescent primary colours that gradually darken into monochrome.
??Absence? plays out like a nightmare in tawdry fluorescent primary colours that gradually darken into monochrome.?
But what is this darkness that stalks? ‘A Vanishing Act’ is almost hymnal in its abstracted and reverent solemnity, in its sweet determinedness to not exist and belief that such a pursuit is not in vain. ?Half awake, half asleep/With my shadows on the sheets/Sleepwalking?. Are they sleepwalking vertically perhaps? That’s one of the enduring effects of Absence*, the way it seems to levitate, to waver precariously like an apparition, to portray some sense of in-betweenness. Its landscape is eminently fragile, like a vision you want to keep but which threatens to recede into distant memory. *Absence is a complete withdrawal, a total abandonment into fantasy via portals that leak remnants of what is being fled. The darkness that lurks is the obscure set of affairs or motives that make people, such as Snowman are, want to disappear, and you’ve always got their previous work if you want to get the gist of why this group is withdrawing. Such is the way their catalogue has locked together, like a triad.
Snowman – S’ance by 00remotecontrol
Snowman didn’t rein in and work with their anger as a means to capitalise on it. Snowman looked for a way out, or a way forward, and this is where they ended up. What results is an emotional odyssey that rings, if not necessarily with truth, then with reality, and with our universal desire to escape it. This record may tempt some to risk mixing their concepts of ?art? with ?rock?, and why not? When so many touted bands vendor boring riff-rock with a hobbyist’s zeal, it’s exceptional when a band is this in tune with its material, when a band has a vision. Here’s hoping that Snowman never, under any circumstances, reform, because their work here is complete.
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####?Absence? is out now through Dot Dash/Remote Control.